There is a direct relationship between HIV/AIDS and violence affecting all social strata, be it through sexual exploitation or abuse – that many times have roots at home. “It is crucial to teach the girls how to defend themselves and to denounce the violence they are victim of,” says one of the participants of the workshop Girls United Against Violence and AIDS that reaches the counties of Recife and Cabo. The campaign, beyond the workshop, has a blog that is used by them to post their views on cases of violence reported by the media, or just to show their views on ways to comfort victims of peculiarly violent situations for being a girl.

The campaign, launched in 2007, has a pioneer approach when interfacing violence and AIDS. The actions include monitoring the system of the Children and Adolescent Rights Act – ECA –, the care structure for youth victim of violence, while reinforcing the need for preventing violence and the HIV/AIDS with youth victim of abuse and sexual exploitation through a sequence of “dialogue roundtables” on the issue at public schools.

Even though there are positive response, the Campaign identifies many challenges such as the lack of unified database system that would ease the monitoring of violent cases, that are badly monitored for the sheer lack of basic information entry. The health care professional resist to write down the cases in detail. And the worst case scenario, the lack or limited prophylaxis medication for HIV in cases of rape.

Since March, representatives of different social strata of Pernambuco have come together to discuss the Integrated Plan to Confront the Feminization of AIDS and other Sexually Transmitted Disease, result of a partnership between the Ministry of Health and the Special Secretary of Policies for Women of the State. The meetings have happened at Gestos.

The plan, that has as a fundamental element the confrontation against the multiple vulnerabilities that contribute for the Brazilian women to become susceptible to HIV or other sexually transmitted diseases, was launched in 2007 March. It has had much publicity in international events, but until today it has not been realized. In 2007 there were macro-region evaluation about the proposal, but the final version of the plan, with the contributions of those consultations, has not been made available either by the Ministry of Health or the State Special Secretary of Policies for Women, whose web site still has the old version of the plan.

In Pernambuco, the Secretary of Health, through the State Coordination of STD/AIDS, was responsible to present the proposal for the State Plan until 2007 December – deadline that has been long gone – and up until today, nothing.

For the organized civil society it is clear that the lack of publicity of the Plan among the social organizations and the lack of articulation between health and women policy managers, even though the plan was confirmed in the last National Conference for Public Policies for Women, 2007 August, has contributed to the demise of the plan’s realization.

Among the organizations that follow the debate are the Health Municipal Council of Recife and of the state of Pernambuco, Women Municipal Council of Recife, Race Equity Council, RNP+, Articulation Pernambuco AIDS, Women’s Forum of Pernambuco, Women Federation of Pernambuco, Young Feminists Colective, Sex Workers Association of Pernambuco and the Family and Gender Nucleus of the Federal University of Pernambuco (UFPE).

Advocacy Network

Civil Society and UNGASS-AIDS

Gestos, Brazilian NGO located in Recife, has utilized the Declaration of Commitment from UNGASS-AIDS 2001 as an instrument for advocacy and research of sexual and reproductive health of women and girls in public policies of sixteen countries. The project is funded by the Ford Foundation, with support from UNAIDS and the Center for International Technical Cooperation—CICT—of the Brazilian National AIDS Program.